Weird Science eats glowing oatmeal for breakfast

Kissing up to your boss, gestures with wolves, and the story of how your …

Oatmeal just as good as eggs—for delivering radioactivity: It may seem rather weird to actually try to get radioactivity into food, but a standard way of measuring gastric transit times involves spiking some eggs with an isotope of technetium. But, if eggs aren't your thing, some folks from Northwestern Memorial Hospital have good news for you: sticking the radioactivity in your oatmeal works just as well. And, better yet, gluten-free oatmeal is also just fine. The trick is to always put your radioactive isotope in the oatmeal before the boiling water is added to prepare it. Now you know.

If it's oatmeal or sedatives, slime molds will take the sedatives: Researchers have studied some forms of slime mold because they are able to create elaborate networks among sources of food, with oat flakes being the food of choice. What hasn't been done previously (to my knowledge, at least), is a study of whether the slime molds actually liked the oat flakes. For no obvious reason, someone has now asked that question. The answer: they like sedatives better. The molds will apparently skip oat flakes (or the even tastier honey) if a plant extract with sedative properties is on the same dish. So, if you're keeping a slime mold as a pet, you might want to keep it away from your ambien.

Yes, but will it give you decent directions to the nuclear blast?: Moving on from oatmeal and returning to the radioactivity theme, we have an unexpected finding that could potentially turn anyone into a nuclear test ban treaty monitor. Nuclear explosions, even ones that occur underground, create an atmospheric disturbance that interferes with GPS signals. Using a series of monitors set up for use by researchers in the earth sciences, people have been able to detect the spread of the disturbance caused by North Korea's test of a nuclear device, and even triangulate it back to the right region of the country. The GPS service that runs the monitoring stations provides access to its data, so anyone can apparently become an amateur nuclear monitor.

No word yet on whether that will interfere with GPS-provided driving instructions, although I understand the traffic in North Korea is pretty sparse.

Being raised by wolves shouldn't really make you all that antisocial: Scientists use the term "theory of mind" for our ability to infer the mental state of other people. There's apparently some debate over whether dogs have a limited sort of theory of mind, given that they are extremely attuned to their human companions' moods and needs. One of the simpler instances of this ability is the fact that dogs know when a human is paying them attention, and are more likely to beg for food when the humans will notice. Apparently, so will wolves, which implies that it's an ability that evolved well before domestication. But at least some of it is learned behavior; dogs that were raised in a home were able to pick up on a larger variety of cues that indicated a person's attention than dogs that were raised in a shelter.

Kissing up to the boss keeps your fellow workers from shunning you: I've never really worked in an office environment, but my experience with watching TV and movies indicates that if you spend your time kissing up to the boss, other workers will end up giving you the cold shoulder. Either the movies have it wrong or things are completely different in China. That's where researchers surveyed a bunch of employees about their workplace environment and skills. Past studies had indicated that two-thirds of employees feel that their fellow co-workers ignored or ostracized them (either that, or a substantial percentage of the workforce is paranoid). The experience of ostracism was apparently present in the Chinese population as well, and people found being on the receiving end distressing.

But it's possible to use your workplace political skills to eliminate the worst of this effect. The specific skill that worked the best? "Ingratiation," which us non-psychologists would probably translate as "doing whatever you can to get on the boss' good side."

Careful where you point that thing: Here's a question you may not have pondered: how many of our immune cells function by targeting and killing cells that are aberrant or show signs of infection, and have a repertoire of lethal proteins to do that? How do they keep this biological heavy weaponry from going off ahead of schedule and killing the immune cell itself? Researchers found a section of one such lethal protein that keeps it moving through the production machinery quickly so that it gets put in a safe storage location before it can do much damage. Swapping out that section for one from a digestive enzyme wiped out these immune cells under the right conditions, as this weaponry did the equivalent of exploding in the factory.

Obvious result of the week: Heavy equipment, variable conditions, heights... we could go on, but there are lots of reasons to expect that construction wouldn't exactly be a safe occupation. So it wasn't a surprise to find out that on-site accidents cause the most cases of traumatic brain injury, more than any other industry. The trinity of agriculture/forestry/fishing had the highest rate of brain damage per employee, which our managing editor probably already knew due to his Deadliest Catch addiction.

3 Reader Comments

On the Deadliest Catch mention, i think a lot of the safety issues there are related to the time based system for limiting the amount of fish and such caught. End result is that people cut corners on safety to increase the rotations crammed into the time period.